Monday Recap: Happy New Year 2012 Edition

Did everyone party like it’s 2012 over the weekend? 2011 is done and over with, and while the last batch of “best/worst of” lists continue to trickle out, we’re looking ahead to the New Year and what it may bring, with the Consumer Electronics Show kicking off next week and Mobile World Congress next month. Of course, neither of those events are places where Apple historically rears its head, but stay tuned as we dig up all the latest from Cupertino this year. That includes today, so read on for the first few nuggets from Monday, January 2, 2012.

Palm’s webOS: Doomed from Inception?

Where tech is concerned, 2011 will long be remembered as both the debut and the premature burial of the HP TouchPad, the webOS-powered iPad competitor that famously crashed and burned after only seven weeks on store shelves. According to a new report in The New York Times, the entire webOS platform may very well have been hanging by a thread from its inception at Palm -- and many former employees blame its eventual fate on the decision to build the OS around the open-source WebKit engine which also powers Apple’s Safari browser. Developed in about nine months, Palm apparently took some shortcuts in the webOS development, but former senior director of software Paul Mercer also blames the company’s inability to recruit top talent “who had a keen understanding of WebKit,” since most of them had already landed at Apple as well as Google, who built their Chrome browser around the same technology. It’s a fascinating read for any Palm or webOS fan.

Apple Accidentally Posts, Pulls GameStore Test App

The App Store is slowly coming back to life after iTunes Connect being shut down for a week over the holidays, and it appears Apple’s elves are still a bit sleepy heading into the first week of the New Year. MacRumors is reporting that a mysterious new app known as GameStore appeared on the iOS App Store on December 31 which appears to be “a test app of some sort, offering several racing-themed in-app purchases but without any actual functionality.” Priced at 99 cents, the app posting date is actually listed as June 9, 2009, which corresponds to Apple’s annual WWDC event. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure what GameStore had in store for us, because Apple has now pulled the app from the App Store after it drew a bit of unwanted attention earlier today.

Search Data Suggests Kindle Gift Cards Outsold iTunes?

Now here’s a curious bit of holiday news: According to Experian Hitwise, the search term “kindle gift card” was the top-ranked query the week before Christmas -- and Apple’s own iTunes gift card was quite far behind in eighth place. That is leading AllThingsD and Experian to muse about the possibility that Kindle gift cards might have actually outsold iTunes gift cards over the holiday season. It might make sense considering Amazon’s Kindle was clearly a hot Christmas gift this year, and what better to accompany such a cool gift but a gift card for spending money on the e-tailer’s website?

Annual “Lucky Bag” Discounts Again Hit Japanese Apple Stores

Japanese retailers have a nifty annual tradition of bringing in the New Year with “lucky bags,” which MacRumors describes as “grab bags filled with unknown items at a substantial discount from their retail prices.” To get those amazing discounts, the customer has to buy the contents of the bag and live with it. MacRumors reports that Apple’s Japanese stores have once again participated in this year’s lucky bag celebration with a 33,000 yen ($430 US) offering that includes a 16GB iPad 2 or 8GB iPod touch as the main item -- with a few lucky customers finding an 11-inch MacBook Air bundled in theirs.

And Just Like That, Verizon Drops Plans for $2 “Convenience Fee”

Last but not least, you may have missed the followup report to Verizon Wireless’ plans to initiate a $2 “convenience fee” for many bill payments, an unpopular decision that spread like wildfire across the internet last week. According to The New York Times, only a day after officially announcing the change -- which would have taken effect on January 15 -- Big Red backpedaled and sandbagged the entire effort. “Verizon Wireless has decided it will not institute the fee for online or telephone single payments that was announced earlier this week,” the press release stated, which came just ahead of word that the FCC planned to question Verizon about the policy, claiming it was “concerned about Verizon’s actions.” That should keep other wireless carriers from thinking about a similar policy, at any rate.